The Forum aims to promote inquiry into the challenges of overcoming existing barriers to social justice towards achieving the objectives that are implicit in our name: the Centre for the Transformative Regulation of Work. This raises broad questions of which many, in practice, remain unresolved – ranging from the “informal economy” to the mechanisms driving inequality, the implications of “progressively” realising socio-economic rights, and other challenges. Crucial, too, is the question of why so many policies aimed at changing the status quo have had such limited impact, and what needs to change. More penetrating research on these concepts and issues (and more), we think, is a necessary step towards the practical transformation of work regulation.

Apart from framing the centre’s research agenda, The Forum is intended to facilitate collegial engagement on how to develop this agenda – whether through new institutional models, alternative policy frameworks, or reimagined approaches to labour law. Through dialogue, debate, and jointly developing ideas, we hope to promote collaborative research projects that will move beyond diagnosing problems to grapple with the harder question: how do we resolve them, not in theory but in practice?